Is Keyword Research critical to SEO?

Yes, Keyword Research Critical to SEO. Keyword research finds which keywords you should be targeting with the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) . Many people think about them that they know which keywords they should target.

Instinct can be a good resource, but this can also be misleading and this is almost not enough always. Lets take an example – “Search Engine Optimization” gets an estimated 16,000 searches a day while “Search Engine Marketing” gets an estimated 8,800 searches per day.

If you are about to target “Search Engine Marketing”, you may get good rankings, but it would get you only half of the traffic that you could have had if you had targeted and ranked well for “Search Engine Optimization”.

There are also some keywords that you can’t rank well for without significant amount of link building and a lot of time regardless of how well you optimize your website. Also, there are some keywords that other people will use to search for what your website offers that you would never think of. So, in addition to letting you know which keywords are more popular, the research can also provide new keywords to target.

Drawing on the analogy in search marketing parable, optimizing your site without first doing keyword research is like picking apples from a tree without first checking that if there are any apples on it or if the apples are within your reach.